Track-Change Diplomacy: Technology, Affordances, and the Practice of International Negotiations

Most multilateral negotiations today take place via the computer screens, tablets, and mobile phones of diplomats, whom distance may separate, but who negotiate 24/7. The logical question is: How does technology influence international negotiations?
REBECCA ADLER-NISSEN and ALENA DRIESCHOVA explore “track-change diplomacy,” that is, how diplomats use information and communication technology (ICT) to collaboratively edit and negotiate documents.
“But technological advances and the ubiquitous nature of ICT do more than just facilitate negotiations. They also push negotiations in a particular direction, sometimes with unexpected consequences.”
To analyze the widespread but understudied phenomenon of track-change diplomacy, the authors adopt a practice-oriented approach to technology, developing the concept of affordance: the way a tool or technology simultaneously enables and constrains the tasks users can possibly perform with it.
Their article, titled ‘Track-Change Diplomacy: Technology, Affordances, and the Practice of International Negotiations’ and published in International Studies Quarterly shows how digital ICT affords shareability, visualization, and immediacy of information, thus shaping the temporality and power dynamics of international negotiations.
These three affordances have significant consequences for how states construct and promote national interests; how diplomats reach compromises among a large number of states (as text edits in collective drafting exercises); and how power plays out in international negotiations, the authors contend.
Drawing on ethnographic methods, including participant observation of negotiations between the European Union's member states, as well as in-depth interviews, the analysis casts new light on these negotiations, where documents become the site of both semantic and political struggle. “Rather than delivering on the technology's promise of keeping track and reinforcing national oversight in negotiations, we argue that track-change diplomacy can in fact lead to a loss of control, challenging existing understandings of diplomacy.”

Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Alena Drieschova, Track-Change Diplomacy: Technology, Affordances, and the Practice of International Negotiations, International Studies Quarterly, Volume 63, Issue 3, September 2019, Pages 531–545, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqz030

Levels of Dependence Between the European Union and Other International Organizations in Peacebuilding

With the European Union (EU)’s growing engagement with other international organizations (IOs) on peacebuilding, academic literature has been paying much attention to the reasons for the EU and its partners’ successes and otherwise in their interactions. Such discussions are furthermore often conceptualized around cooperation, competition and conflict.
What much of the literature fails to address are the reasons why the EU consistently interacts with other IOs in peacebuilding, write PETAR PETROV, HYLKE DIJKSTRA, KATARINA ĐOKIĆ, PETER HORNE ZARTSDAHL and EWA MAHR. Indeed, resource dependency theory, the most convincing account in organization theory explaining why organizations interact seems difficult to apply to IOs, they write in the Journal of European Integration.
Whereas this theory stresses the resource dependence of organizations on their environment, IOs tend to rely mostly on their membership. In their article, titled ‘All hands on deck: levels of dependence between the EU and other international organizations in peacebuilding, the authors attempt to expand the scope of the resource dependency perspectives and make them applicable to interactions between the EU and other IOs and thus provide a more nuanced explanation as to the reasons behind the EU’s cooperative preference.
The article argues that one needs to account for macro-level and micro-level dependencies in addition to the more conventional meso-level dependencies. While the EU in Kosovo, for instance, might not be formally dependent on other IOs – apart from NATO’s security provisions and the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK)’s information about northern Kosovo – for the implementation of its Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo, or EULEX, the EU can only succeed in bringing stability and progress in Kosovo, if the other IOs are also effective in fulfilling their own mandates. Despite the EU’s extensive commitment, the full challenge of Kosovo is too large for the EU to address, which has resulted in a division of labor across IOs.
Similar to such macro-level dependencies, the authors state, “we should neither underestimate the importance of micro-level dependence”. While ad hoc, one-off, contributions by partners might not be essential for IOs to fulfil their core mandate, such contributions are often very welcome. It has been long stressed that particularly on the ground, there tends to be a large degree of practicality to interactions between IOs based on informal and personal relations. Even if not institutionalized through formal and permanent agreements, ad hoc contributions are often the bit of oil that keep the machinery running.
“While this article has given illustrations through insights from Kosovo, Mali and Armenia, the article also triggers new questions,” the authors state. First, while it is useful to distinguish between these levels, a key question is how the levels relate to each other. UNMIK, as originally established, sought to create a formalized division of labor amongst IOs through its pillar structure. This is where the macro and meso levels intersect. Similarly, there are different degrees of formality that may distinguish between the meso and micro levels.
“Second, we have not tried to explain variation across cases within the levels.” For instance, macro-level interaction is more problematic in Kosovo than Mali. At the same time, the pre-accession process in Kosovo provides a macro-level focal point for the international community. The situation is less clear in Armenia where the EU is a secondary actor.
“The new framework we have put forward should facilitate further research into the dependencies of IOs across the different levels,” the authors state.

Petar Petrov, Hylke Dijkstra, Katarina Đokić, Peter Horne Zartsdahl & Ewa Mahr (2019) All hands on deck: levels of dependence between the EU and other international organizations in peacebuilding, Journal of European Integration, DOI: 10.1080/07036337.2019.1622542

Operationalizing Conflict Prevention: Role of UN Police

Since they were first deployed in the 1960s, UN Police have been an established instrument in the peace and security toolbox of the United Nations. Although their role has increasingly been framed as preventive, police contingents have become a regular feature of special political missions as well as peacekeeping operations.
The concept of ‘sustaining peace’ has consolidated the notion of UN Police as a central actor in conflict prevention in a wide range of settings and stages of conflict. In the context of the recent peace and security architecture reform, the UN Secretary-General formally assigned UN Police the role of a system-wide service provider.
While this opens up a range of deployment settings where UN Police can contribute to conflict prevention, writes ANNIKA S. HANSEN, it also entails organizational, financial and political challenges.
Some challenges are specific to police, others are inherent to preventive engagement more broadly but have police-specific connotations, the author writes in ‘Operationalizing Conflict Prevention – The Role of United Nations Police’, a policy briefing published by Berlin-based ZIF-Center for International Peace Operations. She suggests the following key considerations:
Finding a persuasive narrative: The most fundamental challenge is gaining host-country consent for early preventive engagement without appearing to undermine its authority and sovereignty and potentially ‘exposing’ areas of fragility and contested legitimacy. The joint World Bank-United Nations report “Pathways for Peace” (2017) suggests that a narrative which explains how preventive support will in fact bolster a state’s sovereignty and capacity might be persuasive.
Balancing technical and political engagement: Concepts of police reform have long argued that building state capacity without concurrently establishing democratic oversight and good governance, bears the danger of strengthening corrupt or authoritarian institutions. Hence, promises of technical support to enhance sovereignty must be complemented by political engagement, in order not to aggravate tensions and feed conflict drivers.
Addressing regional dimensions of conflict dynamics: Although conflicts tend to be part of a regional system, most deployments remain country-based: UN Police conduct activities with national police services and other stakeholders as part of a peace operation within a particular country. There are few examples of support to conflict prevention through regional offices to address transnational dimensions of conflict. The Peacebuilding Plan for Liberia is one; it foresees future support being channeled through the UN Office for West Africa and the Sahel. These examples are likely to increase in the future.
Avoid flying blind: Conflict analysis in the UN has been notoriously disjointed. Efforts are underway to strengthen these capacities throughout the system, but challenges remain in merging component parts of the analysis produced by different stakeholders into a cohesive UN strategy for conflict prevention. This also entails structuring UN Police cooperation with DPPA and other system-wide instruments for coordinating conflict prevention.
Convincing member states of expanding portfolios: Russia and China are the most vocal member states that consider broadening the context of UN Police assistance to non-mission settings beyond the remit of the UN Security Council. Perhaps recognizing that the GFP is the primary entry point for such assistance, Russia rejected that a call for greater member state support for the GFP be included in the December 2018 SC Resolution 2447 on Police, Justice and Corrections.
Securing resources: Mobilizing funds for preventive activities has been challenging. While UN Police efforts in a peace operation are funded through the support account (peacekeeping budget), there are no such ready funds in non-mission settings – nor are there currently modalities for deploying individual officers outside of the SPC setup. Where the Peacebuilding Commission is engaged, such as in Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia, the Peacebuilding Fund can provide vital funding to address post-transition needs. All other extra-budgetary financing has to be generated for a specific program, such as the senior management training for police in Tunisia, which individual member states have funded through UNDP and OHCHR projects. Germany is also providing funding to enable preventive UN Police deployments.
Pursuing prevention in new thematic areas: New areas, such as organized crime and preventing violent extremism, are pushing their way onto the prevention agenda. Organized crime represents a prime case for prevention: unless addressed early, it festers and infiltrates state institutions. Given the nexus between organized crime and national political dynamics, however, addressing organized crime, for which UN Police has deployed specialized teams as in Mali, endangers fragile consent and confounds political engagement.
The same can be argued when it comes to taking on the prevention of violent extremism. Given the mismatch between the deep roots of destabilizing forces and the duration of UN Police deployments, preventive contributions cannot bear fruit in isolation from longer term political and developmental efforts that can affect underlying causes of conflict. And yet, these contributions bring valuable change where it matters most, close to the people, and thereby maintain space for a political process to unfold.

Peacekeeping Conditions for an Artificial Intelligence Society

As human society searches for ways to achieve global peace, a new possibility may be emerging through appropriate interventions of an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) system.
To achieve this goal, writes HIROSHI YAMAKAWA in the journal Big Data and Cognitive Computing, an AI system must operate continuously and stably (condition 1) and have an intervention method for maintaining peace among human societies based on a common value (condition 2). However, as a premise, it is necessary to have a minimum common value upon which all of human society can agree (condition 3).
In his paper, titled ‘Peacekeeping Conditions for an Artificial Intelligence Society’, the author investigated an AI system that satisfies condition 1. A part of the system may potentially be destroyed, so a robust intelligent agents (IA) society should be a team of autonomous and distributed IAs. A common value of humanity is shared among all IAs. Individual IAs would decompose common goals and derive means so that they can contribute to the advancement of common values. Each IA would diversify its activities to effectively divide tasks among them all. In order to adapt to their local environment, IAs would usually hold, as their local values, sub-goals derived from common goals.
There are a wide variety of local values and competition for available resources will create a competitive situation for IA comrades, the author states. It is an advantage that competition leads to an increase in capacity to achieve a common goal. “However, if the effort towards merely winning the competition increases, cooperation is lost, and devastating struggles occur, creating obstacles to achieving common goals.”
The ideal situation is one in which every agent believes that “all other agents intend socially acceptable goals”, YAMAKAWA writes. Here, “socially acceptable goals” means that the goals contribute to common goals and do not conflict with any other IA’s local values in practice. Under such circumstances, the IA society can achieve goals peacefully, efficiently, and consistently.
Communication channel problems, comprehension ability problems, and computational complexity problems exist, however, that may impede the realization of ideal situations. In an IA society based on a computer, it seems possible to design a distributed global management system that maintains the local values of distributed IAs.
Conversely, humans are biologically constrained. Irreversible death strengthens our survival instincts, and human beings need to maintain our species through reproduction. Humans must also distinguish their mates by appearance. For these reasons, similar people gather and become more likely to form a party. If people divide into groups with similar values and compete for resources, this can be a major cause of conflict.
YAMAKAWA assumes that building a universal AI system to arbitrate conflicts in human society based on a common value would reduce the existential risk. For stable and continuous operation, the AI system in his paper was constructed as an autonomously distributed system, which has concurrency, scalability, and fault-tolerance. Many issues remain to be solved, but this technology is feasible.
“It is desirable for the final form of our proposed AI system to be almost autonomous and worldwide, but part of that system can begin as a conventional AI system with the help of human operators.” However, a new issue will then arise regarding executing arbitrations that are consistent with a common value, while avoiding arbitrary influences of human operators.
Various possibilities for applying superintelligence to reduce existential risks caused by various non-AI factors, such as climate change, have been discussed before. With regard to AI itself, discussions have mainly focused on the increase in risks they might pose.
An approach using advanced AIs to reduce the existing risks that increase with the progress of AIs has not been sufficiently investigated. “However, effectively using the power of superintelligence or more elementary AI to construct future governance will create previously unknown possibilities for the future of humanity.”

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